Faces of FASHIONABLE: Furtuna

This is a part of our Faces of FASHIONABLE series. The inspirational women behind our products have courageous stories of overcoming, and we are honored to share them with you.

Next up: meet Furtuna. She is the hands and feet of FASHIONABLE on the ground in Ethiopia, where a lot of our global products are produced. She's been working on our team since April 2016, and we don't know how we managed without her!

Tell us more about your role. I represent FASHIONABLE in Ethiopia by communicating and following up with our partners. I also do quality control of leather products before every shipment. So a typical day for me is to go to one of our partners based on their schedule to quality control leather products and communicate with the other vendors for updates over the phone throughout the day. Some days I have quality control at 2 or 3, sometimes 1. Some seasons have lots of requesting samples, taking pictures and shipping samples. Whenever I have few minutes in between quality control, I sit to check and respond on emails from the FASHIONABLE team. I talk to Jen over the phone for updates each day and get answers for questions I have.

When you’re not hard at work, what do you like to do in your free time? Whenever I have a free Saturday (hard to get that free Saturday morning), I love to spend time with my husband and play with my 3 year old son and 19 months daughter! I love to stay at home with my kids just being lazy and laughing at their new words :). I love going to church on Sunday morning with my family.

We believe that every one of us understands what it means to overcome, and we are all ABLE to find purpose in the work we do. What is something YOU are ABLE to do because of your work? Because of my work at FASHIONABLE, I am ABLE to rent a better home for my family and send my son to a nice school!

FASHIONABLE began in Ethiopia, with one group of women making scarves. And now we work with 6 partners in Ethiopia, in both our woven and leather categories. And we couldn't do it without Furtuna!!